The Science of James Bond

I owe Ian Fleming a great debt. Ian is my middle name, and when I was a kid, nobody
knew how to pronounce or spell it, or had even heard of it. Many times I was
asked if I was really sure there was such a name (I don't know my own name.
Thanks a lot, folks.) Once James Bond came along, it stopped being a problem. I
just said "Ian, like Ian Fleming," and they got it. The name James
Bond comes from the author of a book on birds of the West Indies. Really. The
book gets a cameo in Die Another Day.

What I Learned from Reading Reviews

Is that there is almost no consensus about James Bond films except that many
feel Connery was better than anyone else, Goldfinger was the best film and Live
and Let Die was near the bottom of a lot of people's lists. Beyond that, some
reviewers raved about films that others bombed.

In fact, some of the reviewers I've read get worked up about such trivial
details and omit such important points that I wonder if they actually watched
the films at all. A few even manage to miss the point of a James Bond movie.
Case in point, one who thought the stolen nuclear weapons in Tomorrow Never
Dies were merely a rehash of Thunderball. Not so. Nuclear blackmail
had nothing to do with it. In addition to fueling a British-Chinese war and
propelling the villain media magnate to the top of the media, destroying Beijing
would leave his Chinese ally the sole survivor of the Chinese government.

There are a bazillion Web pages on Bond films. If you want detailed plot
synopses, lists of the Bond Girls, or cast and music credits, visit them. And of
course there's the indispensable IMDb. This
site deals with the science in the films.

My Personal Heresies

I will go see just about any Bond movie. It's a fun way to waste an evening.
But they all blur together in my mind. Other action films - Under Siege,
True Lies, The Rock - I can recall the plots in some detail. Not so
most Bond films. There's a supervillain and a Bond Girl, but beyond that, most just aren't all that memorable.

The globe-trotting that enchants many viewers strikes me as contrived. Bond
hears that the super-villain is headed to Monte Carlo, so he's off to Monte
Carlo. There he sees a matchbook with a Hong Kong address, so he heads for Hong
Kong. He overhears a chance remark that the villain likes ice in his drinks, so
he goes to Greenland, except he recalls seeing him stirring the drink in the
wrong direction, which means he has to go to Antarctica instead. Observing that
the penguins look like they're wearing tuxedos reminds he he needs to see his
tailor on Saville Row .....

And Now, The Greatest Heresy of All

I like Sean Connery. A lot. He just gets better as he gets older. In just
about every role he's ever played, he's great.

But not as James Bond. Young Connery as Bond exuded all the traits that
caused protestors of the Sixties to label society as "plastic" and
artificial. Picture a Winston or Marlboro cigarette commercial of the early Sixties where
the suave lounge lizard picks up women like dust bunnies because he has the
sexiest cigarette, expand it to feature length, and you have a Connery Bond
film.

Bond films are about seducing beautiful girls, gadgets, and defeating
supervillains who never seem to learn that the way to deal with James Bond is
simply to shoot him. Any suave, good looking British actor could be a credible
Bond. David Niven and Cary Grant would probably have been excellent. The less
famous Michael Rennie wouldn't have been a plausible action Bond but as a more
cerebral Bond he would have been top-notch. In my view,
Roger Moore captured the tongue-in-cheek style of the movie genre better than Connery.
George Lazenby didn't do badly - his principal offense was not being Sean
Connery and not having a big enough fan base like Roger Moore to weather the
transition. As time goes by more and more people are giving Lazenby his due. Pierce Brosnan
was good. Timothy Dalton was the least effective,
not so much because of him as the poor plots of his two films. Some reviewers
thought he captured the menacing side of James Bond as portrayed in the novels
better than anyone. Sam Neill (of Jurassic Park) was reportedly
considered, and while he might make a great secret agent, he wouldn't have fit
the image of James Bond established by Connery and his successors.

I resisted the idea of Daniel Craig redefining the role, but he did a great job.

Dr. No (1962)

When I saw this film recently, I was amazed at what a laughably awful movie
it is. Connery's Bond radiates all the charisma of formica.

Someone is knocking American space shots down (like we needed any help back
then), a British agent is murdered, and Bond is sent to the Caribbean to sort it
all out. As many commentators have noted, the early films went out of their way
to avoid vilifying the Russians, but they needed somebody, so they
either made use of a private cartel or an unnamed Asian power (wink, wink). Dr.
No is a mixture of German and Chinese.

Ursula Undress becomes the first Bond Girl, emerging from the water in her
trademark white bikini. Her sole function in the film, apart from the obvious,
is to get captured and get in Bond's way during their escape. The idea of a
totally naive, gorgeous, uninhibited Child of Nature is a blatant appeal to male
fantasies. Now I can enjoy a good fantasy, but I like it to be something that
has at least a one in a trillion chance of actually happening. Does any male
over the age of eleven actually have fantasies like this? Fantasizing about
quantum tunneling into the Playboy Mansion is realistic in comparison.

This film marks the first appearance of Bond's CIA counterpart, Felix
Leiter, played by Jack Lord. Lord, who went on to star in Hawaii Five-O,
makes an effective partner. Unfortunately, the producers just couldn't maintain
continuity in the role, and you never knew from one film to the next who would
turn up as Felix Leiter. I think John Candy had a go at it once. They'd have
been better off not trying, and just introducing new CIA figures as needed.

From Russia with Love (1963)

Another low-tech early entry. The struggle in this case is over a stolen
Russian decoding device.

The howler in this film isn't scientific but geographic.
Bond and his Turkish colleague descend into a cistern, row to the other
end, and come up under the Russian Embassy in Istanbul. In the real Istanbul
the cistern (shown at right) is only about fifty meters long and several miles from the
Russian Embassy, and in between there is an arm of the Bosporus called the
Golden Horn about a hundred feet below the level of either.

Besides, we're to believe that the utterly paranoid Soviet Union would build
an embassy without knowing there were hidden tunnels underneath it? Isn't that
one of the first lessons they teach in spy school?

Goldfinger (1964)

Now we're getting into familiar territory. The stakes are higher and Bond has
his gadget-filled car. This is the quintessential Bond film. Ian Fleming was a
real secret agent during World War II and the novels portray James Bond on
realistic spy missions against sinister but fairly mundane villains. The films
mutated Bond into a more tongue in cheek character heavily armed with gadgets
and facing off against supervillains, and this film more than any other is
responsible.

I seriously do not believe the most famous scene in the movie, where Bond's
brief dalliance with Goldfinger's secretary causes her to be encased in gold
paint and smothered, we are told, because her skin "couldn't breathe."
Come on, every wet-suit scuba diver would be asphyxiated. I might believe that
sealing all the pores in the skin could cause heat stroke, and maybe some toxic
problems if the sweat glands couldn't excrete toxins, but not in an hour or so.

Lasers were very new and very cool in 1964 when the famous scene of Bond tied
to a slab and about to be bisected by a laser was filmed. But why a slab of
steel? It doesn't take nearly as much power to slice a human as a slab of steel,
so why waste time cutting the steel? Also, need I add that laser beams are
invisible unless there's something in the air to scatter light, like dust,
smoke, or water droplets? Apparently I do.

This film also features Odd Job, the Asian henchman with a top hat that can
be thrown like a Frisbee, and whose metal rim can slice through just about
anything. I submit this is aerodynamically and metallurgically impossible.

1964 was so innocent. The producers actually believed that destroying Fort
Knox would wreck the U.S. economy. Since then, we've seen so much fiscal
bungling, yet still survived, that we'd almost welcome Auric Goldfinger.
Compared to what we've seen since then, Goldinger seems like a rather tame
threat.

Thunderball (1965)

Back in 1965 we thought secret cartels with the ability to engage in nuclear
blackmail were a neat plot idea. That was before they actually became possible.
This film marks the appearance of SPECTRE - the Special Executive for
Counterintelligence, Terrorism, Revenge and Extortion.

Okay, you've stolen a jet from a major power, crashed it in shallow water,
murdered its crew, and hijacked its nuclear payload. You have an army of trained
scuba fighters and impressive underwater technology. What do you do with the
plane?

You dig a hole and bury it on the sea floor.

You salvage the jet and hide it for future use in other nefarious plots

You tow it beyond the edge of the continental shelf and drop it into deep
water where it can't be found (especially in 1965)

You dynamite the jet to smithereens to make it harder to find

And the correct answer is e. None of the above. You leave the jet where it is
and cover it with a camouflage net.

Next question. Your agent masquerades as a NATO officer, successfully hijacks
a jet with nuclear weapons, flies it to the exact correct spot in the ocean,
executes a dangerous water landing, and waits patiently underwater for the bad
guys to show up. What do you do?

Promote the guy. He clearly has what it takes.

Recruit him for future missions.

Pay him handsomely and give him a new identity.

Take him out for a Happy Meal.

And the correct answer is e. Kill him. No wonder it's so hard to find good evil
henchmen these days.

You Only Live Twice (1967)

Somebody's knocking down American and Russian rockets with the intention of
provoking a war and moving into the resulting vacuum.

There's a Maltese Falcon quality about this film. When I saw
Maltese Falcon, I was constantly struck by the idea that it was one cliche
after another, until I realized that Maltese Falcon was the original and
that the cliches were cliches by virtue of being copied from Maltese Falcon.
Similarly, ninjas are so old-hat now that you have to stop and remember they
were very novel when they appeared in this film. The ultralight aircraft that
Bond uses to infiltrate the villain's secret lair was very cool and very "secret
agent" in 1967, even slightly unbelievable. Nowadays anyone can fly them.

The secret base is hidden under the crater of a Japanese volcano. The crater
lake has a false bottom that slides open to allow the villain to fire his secret
weapon. Considering how much it took to fix a simple leak in my roof, I doubt if
even SPECTRE's budget could do it.

Casino Royale (1967)

Ian Fleming sold the rights to this story before James Bond really took off,
so it was made for TV in the 1950's and again as a film. Then in 2006 it
was re-made again, with Daniel Craig as the first blond Bond. Most memorable
line: someone has stolen his riding crop made from a tree fern stem, prompting him to
ask "where's my blond Bond frond wand gone?" Okay, I made that up.

On Her Majesty's Secret Service (1969)

George Lazenby was tried for the capital crime of not being Sean Connery. He
was found guilty. The sentence, death to his career as James Bond, was executed
immediately. This is the film where Lazenby marries Diana Rigg, only to have her
killed by Blofeld at the end of the film.

Diamonds are Forever (1971)

A thoroughly muddled mess of a film. In the most unsatisfying Bond escape ever,
he's sealed inside a casket in a crematorium and the oven is fired up. Just in
the nick of time, the Bond Girl discovers him inside and shuts it off. Talk about
dea ex machina.

This film is also notable for Wint and Kidd, the two weirdest villains in any
Bond film. They're flamingly gay, commit murders that have no imaginable purpose
in the plot, and interact only peripherally with Bond. They never reappear in
any other film. What is this all about?

The plot, such as it is, involves buying up every available diamond to build
a super laser.

Live and
Let Die (1973)

The most widely reviled Roger Moore film. The most astute review comment I
found was one that asked "wasn't this screenplay originally written for
Shaft?" To be sure, the idea of a lily-white British agent trying to dig up
facts in Harlem, even if he's trying to bait the bad guy into showing himself,
is pretty bizarre.

Do you really need to send your best secret agent to break up a drug ring?

One reviewer fairly frothed at the mouth over the "overacting" of
the redneck Louisiana sheriff. This just in, folks, it's a James Bond movie.
Plus he's supposed to be a stereotypical southern redneck. He's supposed
to overact. If you want subtle, nuanced performances, you need to look someplace
else. Try Sundance or Cannes.

The pseudoscience in this film involves Solitaire, the drug lord's tarot
reader. She was played by Jane Seymour, who went on to star in Dr. Quinn,
Medicine Women, the most gratingly Politically Correct Western of all time,
something that made you yearn for the gritty, hard-edged cynicism of Little
House on the Prairie. Solitaire, of course, gives the drug kingpin
infallible guidance until she, er, loses the gift courtesy of James Bond (guess
how?).

What I'd really like to see is a movie where the villain relies on paranormal
assistance and the results are no better than random guessing, like they are in
real life. I'd like to see a TV crime show where the psychic ends up being
repeatedly wrong and finally charged with obstruction of justice. (A Law and
Order - SVU episode where a "psychic" turned out to be a cold-reader and the
actual villain was a start in the right direction.)

I don't care what you think. I think the boat chase is a hoot.

The Man with the Golden Gun (1974)

The only James Bond novel I have read. I found it to be a rather ho-hum piece
about a fairly petty crook. I found myself wondering why they just didn't call
the police. The locale is transplanted from the Caribbean to the Far East,
instead of run of the mill racketeering and drug dealing the issue is now a
stolen prototype of a super-efficient solar collector, and the redneck sheriff
from Live and Let Die is back. Outside of that, it's a totally
faithful adaptation of the novel.

Okay, guys, the gizmo is a prototype. That means it's a trial version.
Plus it was stolen from the British. They still have all the plans and notes.
So make another one already. So Scaramanga, the titular bad guy, has it
and can use it as a weapon. Fine. First time he fires it, locate the source and
bomb it. It's not like he can mount it on a moving vehicle.

The finale marks the first appearance of a locale that appears in several
later films (and also in Revenge of the Sith, by the way), a spectacular submerged tower karst landscape that is actually on
the coast of southern Thailand. If you hit the Web for references to tower karst
in Thailand you will encounter some of the most garbled geology anywhere. Most
of the sites (apart from a few by geologists who actually know what they're
talking about) confuse the age of the rocks (260 million years) with the age of
the eroded landforms (formed in the last couple of million years). It's like
saying that the Lincoln Memorial is millions of years old because that's how old
the marble is. But the best (worst) site is by a kayaking outfit that links the karst to plate tectonics:

The islands of Phang Nga Bay were formed by the movements of massive slabs of
earth called "plates". These plates, however, were underwater. They
were part of the coral reef. They were lifted out of the seas by the movement of
the plates.

The Spy Who Loved Me (1977)

Underwater Moonraker. The evil villain is capturing American and
Russian submarines with the intent of starting a global nuclear war and
rebuilding the earth from his undersea hideout.

This film features Jaws, the villain with stainless steel teeth.

Moonraker (1979)

Maybe the second most-reviled Moore film, and certainly the most far-fetched
plot. The bad guy is stealing space shuttles so he can launch a select crop
of perfect people to his outer space hideout. Then he'll destroy the world and
repopulate it with his servants.

The film opens with a space shuttle being ferried by its 747, only to have
the shuttle engines fire, destroying the 747 and launching the shuttle. This is
so scientifically ridiculous it's hard to know where to begin. A shuttle is so
heavy that it will not carry any excess weight while being ferried. Certainly
not fuel. Not only is it excess weight, but it's a safety hazard. Then, the fuel
aboard a shuttle isn't sufficient to get it anywhere except moderate orbital
maneuvering plus slowing down for re-entry. That's what the huge external tank
and strap-on boosters are for.

Jaws is back. He and
Bond get into it on the cable car above Rio de Janeiro, and Jaws bites
through the cable. Now I don't care how strong and sharp Jaws' dentures are -
his bite will only be as powerful as his jaw muscles, and no way will he
be able to bite a thick steel cable. Jaws realizes he's about to be betrayed,
switches sides and helps Bond escape, reforms and finds true love. (No kidding.)

Also, how do people slide down aerial cables and emerge with spotless hands
and clothes? Every cable car I've ever ridden has had cables liberally slathered
with grease for lubrication and protection from corrosion. That would make them
pretty hard to hold onto. Even if the cables were totally dry, dust and metallic
wear particles would make them positively filthy. Change your brakes in formal
wear if you doubt it.

For Your Eyes Only (1981)

A little unfinished business first.
Bond snags Blofeld's wheelchair by
helicopter and drops it down a
smokestack. Only thing is, Blofeld
is not
mentioned by name. Seems that early
on a collaborator of Fleming's was
given partial rights to
Thunderball, including, among
other things, the right to use the
name Blofeld. Since it was
impossible to guarantee there would
never be another film featuring
Blofeld, there was never a revenge
sequel to On Her Majesty's Secret Service,
in which Blofeld killed Bond's wife.
So that loose end gets tidied up
after a fashion.

Another lower-tech entry. This time
the Hot Item is a prototype sub tracker,
pursued by both Bond and the Russians.
The chase finally leads to the
spectacular clifftop monasteries of Meteora,
in northern Greece. Bond, cornered,
flings the gizmo over the cliff and
says "now neither of us has
it." The Russians, satisfied,
leave.

Except that (a) it's a prototype.
The British still have all the plans
and data to make another one. Plus
(b), if you really want it badly
enough, you send a team to the base of
the cliff and scour until you have
every single microchip. This is not a
cheap CD player, where if it breaks
you throw it away.

Octopussy (1983)

A confusing rehash of Thunderball, about a plot to detonate a nuclear
weapon at an American base in Germany and use the resulting fallout (real and
political) to disband NATO.

Never Say Never Again (1983)

Bond, not authorized

A View to a Kill (1985)

This is one of the most science-rich entries in the series.

The pre-credit chase scene is one of the cooler ones. Bond recovers a
microchip from a slain agent (003) in Siberia, then flees with Soviet ski troops
in hot pursuit. He improvises the runner from a wrecked snowmobile into a
snowboard (totally new and daring at the time) and escapes the last of his
pursuers by skimming across a meltwater pond to a Beach Boys tune. A drifting ice floe offshore is
actually a British mini-sub, piloted by a paunchy middle-aged male naval
officer. Yeah, right.

The recovered chip is identical to ultra-modern Western chips immune to the
electromagnetic pulse from a nuclear weapon, meaning the Russians are somehow
getting them. This in reality would probably have been a good thing, since it
would make both sides more immune to a first strike and thereby lessen the
temptation for one.

The Russians are "somehow" getting them because the head of the company that
makes them, Max Zorin, supposedly a former East German defector, is actually a
KGB agent. He's also the result of a Nazi concentration camp experiment to
produce ultra-intelligent babies. He was one of the rare examples that survived,
and unfortunately, he is also not just a villain but thoroughly psychotic. In a
career move that put him on a whole new track, the role is played by - you'll
never guess - Christopher Walken (admittedly in 1985 he wasn't as entrenched in
that persona as he later became).

His evil henchwoman is played by Grace Jones, who is truly menacing. She also
seduces Bond, a concept that makes me sick to my stomach just thinking about it,
except the scene is mercifully brief.

Bond infiltrates Zorin's chateau outside Paris in the guise of a would-be
horse buyer. He discovers crates of Zorin's microchips, although it's never
really explained why Zorin would ship crates of microchips to a horse-breeding
chateau or why anyone would be suspicious about his having crates of his own
company's chips even if he did. But Zorin decides Bond has to go, kills his
chauffer (another agent), knocks Bond out, and sinks their car in a lake. Kudos
to Zorin for actually coming up with a plan that would realistically kill Bond,
then sticking around to make sure it's done. Although if you're going to sink
someone's car in a lake to make it look like an unfortunate accident, it might
help not to put the bodies in the back seat. Anyhow, Bond revives in time
to get out of the sinking car, then, seeing Zorin still watching from under
water, unscrews a tire valve and uses the air in the tire for breathing. One of
the more intelligent Bond escapes.

Zorin meanwhile travels to San Francisco, where he reveals to his evil
accomplices his plan to corner the world microchip market by destroying Silicon
Valley. Apparently none of these guys knew about Route 128 around Boston, or all
the Asian places that were making knock-off clones of chips even then.
Destroying Silicon Valley would slow down the design of new chips for a
while, but hardly make a dent in the production of existing chips.

While in France, Bond spotted Zorin writing a check to a beautiful American
(Stacey Sutton, played by Tanya Roberts). When he spots her in San Francisco
(it's never really made clear how or why Bond got to San Francisco) he - what
else? - trails her. She is the heiress of an oil company taken over by Zorin,
and also a geologist. The check was Zorin's offer to buy out her interest in the
company. When Bond tells her that Zorin's oil wells along the Hayward Fault are
pumping sea water into the fault, she becomes alarmed and volunteers to
help Bond access the drilling records for Zorin's company. They are, of course,
caught. Zorin traps them in an elevator and sets fire to the building (San
Francisco City Hall). They escape and flee in a hijacked fire truck which makes
good its final escape by jumping a drawbridge.

The fantasy geography here is something else. There are no oil or gas wells
within many miles of San Francisco. I suppose you could imagine the California
state geological survey being housed in City Hall in San Francisco, but since
government agencies tend to take up room, it's unlikely (actually, the Bay Area
office is down in Menlo Park with the U.S. Geological Survey). For the life of me I
don't have a clue where there's a drawbridge leading out of San Francisco - all
the major bridges are built high enough to accommodate any imaginable ship. The
only place I can think of would be along the south bay shore of the city and
you'd have to work fairly hard to get there. Plus pursuing police could simply
go around and wait on the other side. Surely someone familiar with the area like
Sutton would know a better way out of town. And I've never seen a drawbridge
whose counterweight could crush a car parked in the wrong place.

Bond and Sutton end up at Zorin's mine on the San Andreas Fault, where they
discover that his plot is to flood both the San Andreas and Hayward Faults, then
blast the one remaining spur of solid rock restraining the faults. Both faults
will then slip, flooding Silicon Valley. "He'll kill millions" says Sutton, and
since flooding Silicon Valley would also involve submerging San Jose to the
north, that's probably accurate. Apparently neither the producers nor their
intended audience know the way to San Jose, since the location of Silicon Valley
is always described in terms of San Francisco. This is a totally Rube Goldberg
way of doing things. Surely someone with Zorin's wealth and access to ruthless
henchmen could come up with a simpler way of cornering the global microchip
market.

The plot to flood the fault involves dynamiting the floors of the reservoirs
along the fault south of San Francisco, although why this would make the rocks
along the fault any wetter than they already are isn't made clear. And the San
Andreas Fault runs offshore for about 20 miles west of San Francisco without
apparently being wet enough to slip. Still, I give the film credit for using a
semi-plausible mechanism instead of setting off nukes or using some hypothetical
magnetic field or seismic wave generator. Also the film deserves credit for
knowing the name of another fault besides the San Andreas. But how exactly do we
know the earthquakes will cause Silicon Valley to sink?

When Zorin discovers Bond is loose in his mine, he triggers the flooding,
drowning his loyal workers and trapping Grace Jones, who exacts her revenge by
helping Bond remove the explosive charge that would trigger the earthquake.
She's done too much evil to be allowed to survive, so she redeems herself by
blowing up with the charge as it rolls harmlessly out of the mine. Bond grabs
the mooring line of Zorin's airship, whereupon Zorin decides to slam him into
the Golden Gate Bridge. If it was me, I'd take him 20 or 30 miles out to sea,
then drag him in the water until he fell off the rope. But then we wouldn't get
to have a climactic fight scene atop the Golden Gate Bridge.

One bit character is a sexy horse trainer with the titillating name Jenny
Flex, played by the unfortunately named Allison Doody, best known as the
villainess in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. She and Bond leer at
each other briefly, then she more or less vanishes for most of the film. Was she
originally intended to have a bigger role?

The Living
Daylights (1987)

The first Timothy Dalton film involved thwarting a Russian general who's
trafficking in arms in Afghanistan. The general is in cahoots with a renegade
American general turned drug trafficker, played by Joe Don Baker. These two just
aren't big enough potatoes to warrant sending James Bond after them. Baker starred
in the hideous Mitchell films, lovingly served up in satire by Mystery
Science Theater 3000, but he makes a serviceable evil henchman. He will be
best remembered as the truly creepy and relentless hit man in Charlie Varrick.

Licence to Kill (1989)

This time Dalton goes after a drug lord who has fed long-time pal Felix
Leiter to the sharks. Aficionados of the novels claim that Dalton captures the
personal menace of the literary Bond better than any other film, but the plot
line is just too ho-hum.

The best scene happens early on when Leiter brings in the drug lord by
snagging his plane from a helicopter, then lifting the tail straight up. At that
point the plane has completely lost all lift and can do nothing to regain it.
With no air speed the control surfaces are worthless. The propeller of the plane
only has to pull the plane forward, while the blades of the chopper have to
support its entire weight, so a tug of war between the two should be no contest.
The drug lord doesn't stay arrested very long; his henchmen blow a bridge as
he's being transported, then rescue him from under water.

GoldenEye (1995)

Brosnan's first outing as 007. It opens with him breaking into a chemical
weapons plant, then driving a motorcycle off a cliff and skydiving to catch a diving
airplane. Totally outrageous but fun because it is so over the top. During the
assault on the weapons plant, his colleague, Agent 006, is killed.

The plot involves the theft of a Russian orbital weapon. Since the weapon
deals a devastating electromagnetic pulse, the villains first hijack a prototype
helicopter that is resistant to all electromagnetic warfare. They fly in to the
Russian base that controls the weapon, kill everyone at the base, fire the
weapon to destroy the base and the reaction force sent to investigate, and then
escape. Okay, sit down and think of a hundred ways to do this with fewer
complications.

MI6 suspects the work of a Russian crime cartel and sends Bond to St.
Petersburg. Bond pursues
and is pursued by the villains all over recently-renamed St. Petersburg, creating havoc and
causing most of the population to wonder "those guys won the Cold
War?. At one point Bond and the Bond Girl (survivor of the attack on the weapon
station) are trapped in a helicopter that is programmed to launch missiles which
will then home in on the chopper. Won't somebody please decide to just shoot
him? Fortunately for Bond and the girl, the chopper has an ejection capsule. A
bit later Bond derails an armored military train with a tank, to the
serious detriment of the latter.

The head of the crime cartel turns out to be the former colleague, Agent 006,
who had been thought killed. His motivation was that British Intelligence had
betrayed his parents during World War II. How does he know this? Since he was at
best a baby at the time, why does he care so intensely? And since he'd be at
least 50 by the time this film takes place, wouldn't he be getting a bit old for
the spy game? Anyway, he has a backup control station in Cuba, and a backup
weapon in orbit. His plan, nyah-hah-hah, is to hack the Bank of England, drain
all its funds, then fire the weapon to fry all the computers in London and
destroy all the records of the transaction. Except, of course, for the memories
of the employees who suddenly see all the bank's money transferred, and the
records of the bank that receives the money. Surely somebody will be
suspicious when the Bank of England loses $100 billion and a bank somewhere else
gets $100 billion at the exact same instant, right?

Bond can't locate the transmitter until it suddenly begins emerging from
under a lake, looking astonishingly like the Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto
Rico. Bond breaks into the villain's operations center and the Bond Girl, who is
also a computer programmer, triggers the retro-rockets on the weapon. The
villain and his IT guy try frantically to save the weapon. Sorry, dudes. Unless
you also have thrusters to accelerate the weapon, once the retros are fired,
it's toast. Bond and 006 get into it atop the superstructure of the telescope. I
am mildly puzzled as to how jamming the tracking mechanism will cause the entire
transmitter to burst into flame and explode, but it does.

Tomorrow Never Dies (1997)

The opening action sequence features Bond sneaking into a terrorist arms
bazaar in Central Asia. The Brits order him out and launch a cruise missile,
only to discover to their horror that there are Soviet nuclear missiles there. A
Russian general who is helping is asked "Can't you people lock anything
up?" He warns that even if the missiles don't explode in a nuclear blast, they
have enough plutonium "to make Chernobyl look like picnic."

After a while you just plain get tired of repeating that nuclear weapons
don't go off accidentally. The requirements for a nuclear explosion are very
stringent and they don't happen accidentally simply because everything has to
work perfectly. Plus, the bazaar is in the remote mountains of Central Asia. Who
cares? Anyhow, Bond hijacks the plane with the missiles and takes off with one bad guy in hot
pursuit and another in the back seat. The bad guy starts strangling Bond,
who struggles with the wire while doing aerobatics with his knees. He finally
ditches the bad guy by launching the ejection seat. The bad guy obligingly lets
go of the garrote, rather than hanging on to it and taking off Bond's head when
he goes up. And they're directly under the other plane, which is destroyed when
the ejection seat launches.

Cross Ted Turner with Bill Gates and make them really nasty and you have this
film's supervillain, who dreams of taking over the world's communications. His
plan is to instigate a war between Britain and China, which he will use to
propel his networks to dominance. Also, the war will help his Chinese
co-conspirator (briefly seen) to stage a coup, after which he will give the supervillain a monopoly on Western trade with China.

Teri Hatcher is the supervillain's new trophy wife and former Bond lover,
which gives her a life expectancy of about eight minutes. Joe Don Baker is back,
this time as a good guy, a CIA agent buddy of Bond's named Jack Ward (he
was also in Goldeneye).

When a British ship is sunk off China and the survivors machine-gunned, the
British suspect the Chinese and tensions flare. Bond dives to the wreck from
high altitude. An Air Force jumpmaster solemnly explains to Bond that he'll free
fall five miles so he needs to use oxygen on the way down. Only problem: they're
standing there in the plane with the hatch open and not using oxygen.

Aboard the sunken ship, Bond runs (swims)
into his Chinese counterpart (Michelle Yeoh). In turn they are both captured and
taken to the villain's headquarters in Saigon (aka Ho Chi Minh City). After
being threatened with the usual lingering death, Bond engineers an escape and he
and Yeoh leap from the roof, using the ripping of a huge banner to slow their
fall. Workable? Who knows? Beats free-fall or being tortured to death.

Then there's a frantic chase through Saigon with the pair on a motor scooter
and the pursuing bad guys in a helicopter. At one point Bond jumps the scooter
across a street from rooftop to rooftop, over the helicopter. Neat scene,
but why? On a scooter, they have to stay on the streets and remain visible from above.
On foot they could disappear into the maze of alleys and stay under cover. Also,
even an evil henchman helicopter pilot is not likely to risk hovering below roof
level in a narrow street when it's just as effective to stay up higher. One ding
of the rotor and you're toast. Just put
a good sniper in the chopper.

Turns out Chinese Intelligence has a sophisticated hidden center in Saigon.
At the push of a button, ordinary furniture disappears and complex consoles pop
up. Now how did they build this and move in all this gear, in a setting teeming
with people, without blowing their cover wide open? They might as well have a
red neon sign saying "Chinese Intelligence."

The bad guy's secret weapon is a stealth ship, which as usual is about a
hundred feet long outside and three hundred inside. Brosnan and Yeoh track it
down through the same submerged karst landscape as in Man With The Golden Gun,
damage it enough to give it a radar reflection, and the British finish the job
with the Chinese cheering them on.

Michelle Yeoh is beautiful, intelligent, witty, supremely competent and
refuses to take a back seat to Bond. One of the very best Bond girls.

The World is Not Enough (1999)

This time it's an oil pipeline from the Caucasus to the Black Sea. Sophie Marceau is the owner of the pipeline, but with plans to ensure that her pipeline
has a monopoly.

The villain, turns out, has a bullet in his brain that will eventually kill
him. It has already deprived him of all feeling, which makes some of us, at
least, wonder how he can hold a gun. At one point Marceau starts kissing him,
but knowing that he has no feeling, tells him to "remember pleasure,"
Now if that isn't sadistic, I don't know what is.

Early on, Bond sees a helicopter rigged out with giant rotating saw blades
for trimming tree branches along a road. It may not be the most effective tree
trimmer (although it is a real device) but it comes in handy later on for slicing buildings and cars in half.

The nefarious plot involves taking over a Russian sub and detonating a
nuclear warhead in the Bosporus to prevent tankers from entering the Black Sea.
With that route closed off, Marceau's pipeline will have a monopoly. Except
that:

An ordinary nuclear weapon won't produce enough contamination.

Even a dirty bomb will only contaminate the land. The water may be
contaminated briefly, but currents will disperse the contamination.

A tanker could still make the passage by staying in the center of the
channel away from land and minimizing time in the contaminated area. A
better idea would be to drop the two Bosporus bridges and block the straits.

Die Another Day (2002)

The scariest pseudoscience happened outside the film. A reader wrote Roger
Ebert asking what "conflict diamonds" were. The reader complained he
couldn't find any information anywhere - apparently this guy never
reads the papers, Time, National Geographic, whatever. So I went to
Google, typed in "conflict diamonds," and got a few hits. 86,000, to be
exact. The first ten pages all referred to conflict diamonds in the correct
sense: they're illicitly mined diamonds used to fund civil wars and
terrorist movements, mostly in Africa. So here we have someone who can't
even find things on the Internet. It's like losing a game of hide and seek
with a moose in your living room. Still unsure? Go see the superb Blood
Diamond.

We start off with Bond and some South Korean agents surfing into North Korea and
going after a renegade North Korean colonel who is dealing in conflict
diamonds with a South African smuggler. Bond manages to blow the attache
case containing the diamonds to smithereens but is captured after a
harrowing chase during which the renegade officer apparently is killed.

The problem here is that diamonds pretty much are forever, and most of
them would survive the blast. They would be scattered over an area hundreds
of yards across, but millions of dollars are at stake, and these diamonds
would probably still be more concentrated than they were in the original
deposit. So bulldoze all the dirt from a hundred yards around into a pile
and start sifting.

Oh, yeah. We forgot the credits. They start rolling about 15 minutes into the
film as we see a montage of silhouettes that suggest Bond is having a
seriously bad time in prison. After 14 months he is traded for a North
Korean agent. But his welcome home is muted. M says the cost of getting him
back was too high, plus there are suspicions that he may have leaked
information. So he's locked in a secure hospital room on a warship in Hong
Kong harbor. Part of Bond's training is the ability to control his heart and
breathing, and he uses this ability to play dead and escape.

Once ashore, he checks into his favorite hotel and promptly exposes the
surveillance in his room. He tells the hotelier he's known for years the
hotelier is tied to Chinese intelligence and says he wants information on
the traded Korean agent. The Korean has killed some Chinese agents, so the
Chinese are happy to comply and direct Bond to Cuba.

This is the 20th official Bond film and the 40th anniversary of the first one,
so some homages are worked in. While Bond is in Cuba, we get a glimpse of
Birds of the West Indies by James Bond (source of the name - really). Also Halle
Berry reprises Ursula Andress' emergence from the sea in a bikini. Bond is
led to a mysterious clinic that specializes in "gene therapy." This version
of gene therapy is the ultimate makeover - a complete DNA overhaul
described, in probably a grand understatement, as quite painful. Also
probably quite fatal. Halle Berry turns up at the clinic, too, clearly on a
mission of her own, but just what isn't clear. Between the two of them,
though, the clinic gets blown up, but not before Bond turns up links to a
mysterious billionaire diamond miner.

Bond pops back to London, reports his information, and is told he's once again
useful. The diamond billionaire is in Iceland, ostensibly tending to a new
mine and also preparing the grand unveiling of a secret project, and Bond is
sent off to see what he's up to. To keep an eye on him, he's chaperoned by
agent Miranda Frost (Rosamund Pike). Bond is also outfitted with a stealth
car that becomes virtually invisible.

Iceland is portrayed as a lifeless expanse of solid ice, although the island is
mostly ice-free. As someone once said, Iceland is mostly green and Greenland
is mostly ice. Also, Iceland is an exposed segment of
the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, made almost entirely of basalt, and about the last
place on earth anyone would expect to find diamonds. And although there's a
lot of fanciful speculation lately about making things invisible, it's a
tall order, since you'd have to guarantee that light hitting one side of an
object would somehow be retransmitted from the other side, for all possible
viewing directions at once, and with the same intensity. Active camouflage that mimics ambient colors and
patterns is possible (chameleons do it). There are some prototypes that
achieve highly imperfect camouflage. Making an opaque object completely
transparent; I'll believe it when I see it.

It turns out the special project is a grand orbiting solar mirror complex which
can beam energy to earth, provide light at night, lengthen the growing
season in the far North, and also make one heck of a weapon. It turns out
that the diamond mines are merely a front for laundering conflict diamonds.
Halle Berry is really an American agent, Miranda Frost is the mole who got
Bond captured, and the billionaire diamond miner is the renegade North
Korean colonel after a complete DNA remake. Also R2-D2 is really my old
washing machine. The Good Guys and Bad Guys slug it out in a disintegrating
jet over North Korea.

Between this one and Tomorrow Never Dies, Bond films are definitely more
fun when Bond's female counterpart is as tough and resourceful as he is.
This is actually quite a good film. Bond's relationship with his job and his
bosses is a lot more ambivalent in this than any other film. I do concur
with the reviewers who thought Rosamund Pike made a much better romantic
interest for Bond than Halle Berry. Berry is a wonderful actress but Pike
was a Bond Girl in the classic sense.

Casino Royale (2006)

I really wanted to hate this film. A blond James Bond? How dare they? But the
critics were right. It's a very good movie and Daniel Craig makes a great
Bond. Maybe it's time to reboot the franchise. On a 30 year remake cycle we
could stretch the series out forever.

There's not much science here. Some of the most interesting is in the opening
credits, where we see a playing card theme in which clubs evolve into
fractals and there are some nifty envelope curves. The plot involves Le
Chiffre, a secret banker for terrorists, warlords, and other antisocial
types. He gets in deep doo-doo when his plot to bankrupt an airplane
manufacturer goes haywire. His plan was to short the company's stock, then
drive the price down by blowing up their prototype super jumbo jet. Again
with the prototypes. Do people build prototypes of things and then burn the
plans and shoot all the workers? But Bond foils the plot, in the process
creating a disturbance even TSA can't miss. Considering all the movies where
cars go off cliffs and explode in mid-air, Bond rides a careening
tanker that's leaking aviation fuel all over the place and smashing into
things, and there's not a single spark. The banker is out 100 million
dollars, and plans to recoup it in a high stakes casino poker game. Now if I
was banking for the sorts of sociopaths this guy is working for, I'd be very
careful with their money - blue chips, mutual funds, gold, but this guy
apparently likes to skate on the thin edge.

There's a little action, but mostly the story revolves around the poker game
and its associated intrigues. The spiffiest gadget in Bond's car is a
portable defibrillator. No ejection seats, rocket launchers, or revolving
license plates. If fact, we don't see Q at all.

The Bond Girl (Eva Green) is a Treasury official charged with overseeing Bond's
stake in the poker game. Unfortunately, she's been co-opted by terrorists.
When she refuses to release more money for the game, Bond is rescued by a
CIA agent also in the game. Earlier I joked about the lack of continuity in
the character of Felix Leiter, but even I wasn't prepared for a black
Felix Leiter. Bond wins, but then he and the girl are captured by Le Chiffre,
who wants his money back. Why they didn't anticipate Le Chiffre would be less
than a good sport about losing is a mystery. Le Chiffre's angry customers
storm in and kill him, leaving Bond and the girl alive (a red flag).

Bond takes a while to recover from his ordeal at the hands of Le Chiffre. He
and the girl fall in love, Bond tenders his resignation, and the girl scoots
out to run an errand. The errand is to withdraw the $100 million in poker
winnings and turn it over to the terrorists (who are holding her other lover
hostage). Even allowing for not knowing the girl has turned, this brings up
a legion of questions like:

Why didn't Bond just transfer the money to a British government account
immediately after winning instead of a Swiss bank?

Why didn't the British government have access to the account in any
case?

Why didn't the girl do all her skullduggery while Bond was still recovering from his
injuries?

Why didn't she just give the bad guys the account number and password
instead of carrying a suitcase full of cash around Venice and risking a
personal encounter?

So Bond figures out the girl is working for the other side, follows her, gets
into a major shootout with the bad guys, and in the process blows holes in the
pontoons holding up a building. The building sinks, taking the girl with it. You
work for the bad guys, even under duress, you die. It's the code. Unlike the
Pirate Code, these are rules, not just guidelines.

I definitely do not believe the sinking building. Despite lots of poetic
yammering about Venice being a "floating city," it's built on pilings, not
pontoons. Shooting holes in a pontoon won't necessarily make the pontoon sink if
the holes are above the water line. And I seriously doubt any canal in Venice is
deep enough for an entire four-story building to sink all the way to the roof.
Also, I really don't believe people drown as gracefully and poetically as the
girl does.

As my son pointed out, when this Bond gets beat up, he stays beat up -
he still has the scars next day. And when he gets a microchip injected, he goes
"Ow." I think that's the first time I've ever heard James Bond say "Ow."